The weight of a secret is not in what it contains. Lane and Wegner (1995) show that the cognitive load of suppression is independent of the complexity of the information kept. A trivial secret weighs as much as a grave one. What costs is the act of confining, not the thing confined.
Physiology confirms it. Slepian, Chun and Mason (2017) document that individuals carrying a secret exhibit a measurable elevation of cortisol and a degradation of executive functions proportional not to the content of the secret but to the frequency of situations where the secret must be actively maintained. Pennebaker (1997) establishes the inverse effect: disclosure produces a drop in cortisol and an improvement in immune markers. The body registers the gradient.
Shannon (1948) provides a formal framework for this observation. Information confined to a single node of a network reduces the entropy of the system. The Slepian-Wolf theorem (D. Slepian and J. Wolf, 1973) shows that correlated sources compress better together than separately. A secret breaks this correlation. The holder and the rest of the network operate with incompatible models of reality. The cost of this incompatibility is not metaphorical. It manifests in the body of the one who carries the load.
Landauer (1961) establishes that erasing a bit has a minimal thermodynamic cost of $kT \ln 2$ joules. Maintaining a bit on a stable medium costs nothing. But a secret is not a bit on a hard drive. It is a bit in a network of agents actively seeking to discover it. Maintaining confinement against the pressure of the network is an active, dissipative, continuous process. The cost is not that of storage. It is that of isolation.
Doctrine
Any organization that confines information expends energy to maintain the gradient. Leakage is not an accident. It is the natural slope of the system toward equilibrium.
Vecteur ouvert
If the confinement of information has a physical cost, then the boundary between what is known and what is not is a front. It separates two regions of different entropy. The question is whether it propagates, whether it leaves traces, whether it has a geometry.
